Comments

Comment by PriestessAv

Cone of Ice Lance, interesting. One more clever way to provide synergy with extant class abilities and provide Deathknights with a workable partnership with frost mages, shadowpriests, warlocks, and melee classes.

Comment by faia

this is like a cleave version of a fire blast...ice version ( 10 yards and instant boom)

Comment by Petrov

This is my typical solo AE rotation as frost, albeit with Howling Blast before Blood Boil. Keen observers will notice that the cost for those five abilities are two of each type of rune, meaning you are only limited by the global cooldown. For AE tanking it is important to establish threat on all mobs early so your group can get involved quickly, so I remove Plague Strike and Blood Boil from the rotation to get to the Howling Blast with two less global cooldowns:

Once I get my group to recognize Howling Blast as the "all-in" signal, they know that they can then engage the pack of mobs and carnage ensues. This works assuming that you have a mob with enough hit points to survive until you can drop Howling Blast on the pack; when this is not possible, it is better to just put down Death and Decay and let your group have at them.

Of course, this only works for specifically frost talented Death Knights. There are significant damage modifying frost talents which affect Howling Blast, and with them your Howling Blast will easily out-damage Blood Boil (at level 64, by about a factor of six when considering a non-crit):

Those are just the ones that affect non-critical Howling Blasts. Assuming non-critical and zero bonus frost damage, that's +50% damage, which is applied before the innate damage doubling of Howling Blast vs. Frost Fever-afflicted targets! This results in 300% of base damage when using the fully-talented Howling Blast against a Frost Fevered target. A non-frost-talented Death Knight will only see 200% of base damage using the ability rotation above.

It's still not clear to me when bonus spell damage is applied (as I have none), when the doubling of damage for critical hits occur, when the +15% bonus from Blood Presence is applied (though you should be using Frost Presence when tanking anyways), or when Guile of Gorefiend is applied to crits.

Comment by Boobah

Well, spell damage is never applied to any Death Knight abilities. They do scale with attack power; this is applied before any multipliers.

It doesn't matter what order your multipliers occur; multiplication is commutative so you get the same number no matter what the order. To be clear, all these fun multipliers are multiplied together, not added together and then used to multiply the base damage, so Glacier Rot (+10%), Black Ice (+30%), and Tundra Stalker (+10%) add a total 1.1 x 1.3 = 1.43 x 1.1 = 1.573 or +57.3% damage; Blood Presence (+15%) kicks that up to ~ +81%. Of course, if we're counting Glacier Rot, that probably means Frost Fever so Howling Blast intrinsically does double damage; that kicks damage up to 262% of the tooltip, before accounting for attack power and before it crits.

Comment by Hurono

I see this as one heck of a good DPS move. I really don't see why everyone assumes Frost is tanking; I see my Frost DK leading damage in Warsong Gulch after a 20 min round by 50k. I pretty much use the same rotation Petrov stated, Icy Touch > Pest > HB > BB > Icy Touch > Pest > Deathchill > HB. That followed by a Frost Strike spam mixed with Blood Strike gets me huge damage. Also effective early tanking.

Comment by Reaperds

Ya frost has become one of the best dps spec's for Dk's. It is by far the most balance while blood is best on single target and unholy multiple targets and then frost is in the middle. But its my favorite and I love getting into a group that are like you can't dps as frost and then I beat them all. lol.

Comment by camarouge

I uprated this comment because the run-on sentence reminds me of this mob :D.

Comment by PalaDinka

And what if you use hungering cold deathchill and finally howling blast..........with the fully talented version.

Comment by Decros12

Lol, i cannot find what's good on this spell...it's like blood boil but with approximately 200 more damage...how can this be good in PvP or even in PvE?

Comment by Den4ever

Does it even have a CD?

If no, I think you can forget about Icy Touch...I mean take the glyph and its gonna infect ALL targets in the area of the target you use it on with frost fever, as well as doing damage to them....

idk how bout you but currently I'm blood, but in Cataclysm i will be going either Frost/Unholy since they increased the Frost Strike and the Scourge Strike damage

Comment by TAT0

And it cant replace IT since the cost is 2 runes (1 frost, 1 unholy) instead of 1 frost rune.

Comment by Den4ever

yeahh, i think i lagged cuz it showed only frost rune and no CD

Comment by Frawki

Apparently this is going to be pretty bad-ass in Cata. Only 1 frost rune and no CD. If glyphed it's totally gonna replace IT

Comment by Den4ever

i looked at it in the cataclysm wowhead...

it does cost 1 frost, and has 8 sec cooldown, so it can replace IT because I doubt that anyone uses IT more than once in 8 seconds.

Edit: Considering you have the glyph, of course.

Comment by Meltingbeano

thank god imp IT isnt linked any more since it will be useless nowi carnt wait till cat frost aoe is going to be even easyer

Comment by Xhosant

So, for a frost dk, what's the main nuke? This, Obliterate or FS? In other words, what should our rotation ... rotate... around, frost runes, RP or F&U runes?

Comment by Xhosant

Guys, given the glyph, this renders Icy touch useless... But it lacks the auto-targeting function IT has. Anyone know how to macro it, so that:a)It targets target of friendly targetb)it targets an enemy targetc)it does not change target if it has one already?

Comment by Xhosant

Guys, given the glyph, this renders Icy touch useless... But it lacks the auto-targeting function IT has. Anyone know how to macro it, so that:a)It targets target of friendly targetb)it targets an enemy targetc)it does not change target if it has one already?

Comment by Shageki

Comment by Riverstyx

However, you will still want to keep Icy Touch on your action bars for pulls where CC is necessary (yes, CC is actually worth using again)

Comment by shadeofdeath

I find that this ability is very hard to use in most instances. It really ramps up your dps a ton but it also causes a ton of aggro and unless the tank has a pretty good lockdown on everything in range it tends to pull off them. If this thing is spammable on every time it lights up it adds a good 1000 or more dps but takes a lot of situational awareness.

Comment by Zefyron

In cataclysm,you can get the glyph of howling blast and replace icy touch completely in your frost dps rotation,as it will still inflict frost fever,do a lot more damage+aoe.

Comment by Aera

I am surprised that this had not been mentioned here yet, but Howling Blast recieved a 40% damage nerf to it's aoe. It now only does full damage to the main target, and 60% of initial damage to the surrounding targets. Frost dks were doing rediculously too much damage to medium to large sized crowds. It needed a nerf to be fair to all other classes and so that Unholy spec wasn't useless.

Comment by Bansidh

I'm going to create a new dk and name him Garurumon. That way, I can make a macro every time i cast this and yell "HOWLING BLASTER!"

Comment by boca

The formula for Howling Blast is no longer correct as listed above, within a couple of points it is now:

Blast the target with a frigid wind, dealing (1519 + 50% of AP) Frost damage to that foe, and ((1519+50% of Attack PowerP)/2) Frost damage to all other enemies within 10 yards.

I tried formula above and the one listed from mmo-champion and both need to be updated. Information is correct on deathknightbuilds.com.

Comment by kgurnhill

Comment by mikelut

I love this spell but it definitely isn't what i was expecting... I personally thought this was going to be a pure AoE with no target spell and have a cone shaped range like the Holy Paladin's Light of Dawn. But most of all i thought it would use the animation from the character selection screen after logging in where your Death Knight appears to be howling or yelling and add some sort of spiraling blue wind coming out of his/her mouth. Anyone else think that would be neat?

Either that or change the spell name to match the icy column that is dropped on your unsuspecting targets skull.

Comment by Darknight535

I really think that the AoE effect of this spell should be removed. I'm a level 85 tauren frost dk and I cant test my single target dps becuase I attack any level 85 target dummy in the horde citys and I have to use howling blast in my rotation and when I do it hits all the dummys around me with AoE and makes my dps readout on recount say that I am doing more dps then I really would single target...its really annoying that I cant test my single target dps.

Comment by Horsekebab

Comment by brucek2

Heads up that this is one of your few abilities that will not also automatically start your auto-attack. You may wish to macro it together with "/startattack".

Comment by heartlessnobody

With biting cold and 3/3 of blast radius Howeling Blast deals 87.75 of Ap frost damage and will deal even more with razorice and biting cold. And when Rime procs it will deal 222.75 Ap. I don't know if all the talents affects the aoe part as well

Comment by rinkworks

As of 7.2, Howling Blast no longer causes aoe damage when I solo old content. Running Shadow Labyrinth at level 101, only the targeted enemy dies; the others nearby that used to also die now remain untouched. I hope this is unintentional and will be fixed. Anybody else experience the same thing or know what the explanation is?